Resistant Depression, Could it be Unsolved Trauma?
Have you been been going to therapy year after year without seeing any significant results? Do you feel like your therapy sessions are more like venting sessions? Have you been jumping from therapist to therapist and never finding the growth that you are looking for or due to feeling like your voice is not being unheard? Are you frustrated that your therapy sessions feel more like listening or venting sessions and do not go deep enough?
You are probably dealing with unsolved trauma masking as depression. I have seen numerous clients who have gone through long-term therapy without significant results find breakthrough once they start EMDR trauma therapy. I start hearing them say things like "I'm going places I have never gone before", I am talking about things that I have never talked about before", I am making connections that I have never made before".
Uncovering hidden trauma might be the missing key that will unlock your healing and set you free from repetitive cycles that keep you feeling trapped. The good thing is that EMDR can even resolve pre-birth and pre-verbal traumas that are are not in your conscious awareness. Even when trauma is not in your conscious awareness, your body and your sub-conscious mind has memory of these trauma. It takes a highly skilled trauma informed therapist to help a client uncover issues that might be impacting their mental health that are are not obvious to the client.
Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy you can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. Unlike talk therapy, the insights you gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from your own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. As a result, you conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once caused you distress. Your wounds have not just closed, they are transformed.
As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, your thoughts, feelings and behavior change indicating emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.
By Damaris Karanja, Mental Health Counselor and EMDR Therapist at Healing Streams Counseling.